A love affair with India bears fruit

Local artist’s portraits chosen to honor women’s day

JANE BOLLINGER
Posted 3/1/17

“Women are the glue of India,” Doug Hilson reflects, standing in his Callicoon Center, NY studio in front of a wall of his photographs. Soon, these revealing personal portraits of Indian …

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A love affair with India bears fruit

Local artist’s portraits chosen to honor women’s day

Posted

“Women are the glue of India,” Doug Hilson reflects, standing in his Callicoon Center, NY studio in front of a wall of his photographs. Soon, these revealing personal portraits of Indian women and candid shots capturing them in everyday life, mostly in rural villages, will be whisked away to New York City. There they will be exhibited on March 8 at a private reception at the Indian Consulate in celebration of International Women’s Day.

Hilson has retired full-time to the Upper Delaware River Valley, one of the countless talented artists who happily reside here. Born-and-bred a Mid-westerner, this accomplished painter has lived and worked in New York City, where he was drawn to pursue his professional dream, since 1979.

Nowadays his upcoming photographic exhibit occupies his attention. What arrests the eye first in his wall of pictures are the strikingly brilliant colors of the clothes the women wear, but on second look you realize that Hilson has captured in these faces not only their beauty, but also a suggestion of the inner strength of his subjects, “the glue of India,” as he calls them. 

“Women,” Hilson emphasizes, “are incredibly intelligent, but in many cultures, they [men] will not let them be recognized.”

Hilson calls this “lack of empowerment of women a total waste of resources, [because] they bring a different kind of thinking.”

Hilson’s upcoming photographic exhibition will be as much a celebration of India itself as it is of its women.

Along with his wife, Danielle, he has been to India more than half a dozen times. “We’d always heard a lot about India from our friends Blair and Julia Kling; he was a professor and scholar of Indian history.” And so in 1992, the Hilsons joined their friends, traveling to the sub-continent for the first time.

“Coming from a bland Midwest background, India is the most exotic place on earth,” he opines. “India really got to us: the smells, the music, the people… We love the people.” Hilson confesses that he has about 12,000 photos of people in India, including 5,000 likenesses of children. His dream, he says, is to exhibit a portraiture show featuring the children of India. He will call it “Face to Face.” His own face lights up as he speaks of the children he has met and photographed there.

He shares a story of how he once took photographs of dozens of children in a remote desert village in Rajasthan. Years later, he returned with a book containing 40 prints of those children. “We drove into the village, and I got out of the car with my little book of prints. Suddenly there were children all around. I don’t speak Hindi, so I just put the book down and let them look. Fifteen minutes later, the word had gotten out, and most of the village turned out to see.” Amazingly, that day they found 38 of the 40 children he had photographed.

Hilson is not new to portraiture, though in a different medium. He has had a long and successful career as a fine art painter, including an earlier period when he focused mostly on portraits. The longer view of his career, however, reveals widely varied work, from realism to the abstract, to imagined and complicated cityscapes to a period when he was influenced by Italian opera.

His paintings have been exhibited in galleries across the country since the 1970s. In addition, he taught and encouraged countless art and painting students over several decades as a fine arts professor, before retiring from teaching in 2013 after 26 years at Long Island’s Hofstra University.

Not one to rest on his laurels, however, he took up photography in 2011 and discovered its joys and its challenges, not least of which is his compromised eyesight—a detached retina in one eye and macular degeneration in the other. His experience as a fine artist stood him in good stead, however.

“As a painter, I already knew color, composition, detail and emotion,” he observes. Still, behind the camera, he is self-taught and considers that he is still learning his new medium. He may modestly call himself an amateur photographer, yet one can hardly wait to see what this ever-evolving artist discovers through the lens of his Nikon next time. The Hilsons’ next trip to India will be in 2018.

For those who want to see where his works on canvas have taken him over his lifetime, the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance will show a collection of his large-scale paintings in May.

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